Monthly Archives: December 2012

At the same time as former DC employee Eric Payne is opposing an anti-SLAPP motion filed by the District of Columbia, another former high-ranking employee of the District of Columbia has also been hit with an anti-SLAPP motion in response to her defamation suit. On November 21, 2012, Jennifer Campbell, the former District of Columbia Chief Operating Officer for the Department of Health Care Finance, filed suit against three companies that she alleged made defamatory statements about her, which she alleges directly led to her termination by the District of Columbia.

Eric Payne, the former contracting director of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer, has filed his opposition to the anti-SLAPP motion filed by the District of Columbia and his former boss, Natwar Gandhi. Unlike Dan Snyder and Bradlee Dean, who responded to anti-SLAPP motions by arguing that the SLAPP statute violated the Home Rule (here and here), Payne’s opposition does not attack the statute’s constitutionality. Instead, Payne argues that the statute should not apply because he is not a well-heeled individual aiming to punish a private person, which, he argues, was the purpose of the statute. While Payne’s description …

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